Pain
by Marching Madly Onward
Summary: Coyote Stark lies wounded, but not quite dead.


**Pain**

Stark feels dry. He wonders why that is. This place is so much cooler than the desert. He wonders, pointlessly, for a time, before the answer occurs to him. It's this place.

It's not the human world. It's barely even Soul Society, walled off in a ring of spiritual power. The air hangs stiff and stale here, without as much as a breeze. It's like living in a void.

Stark hates it. He hates the feeling for its own sake, and for the sake that he's still around to feel it.

The Captain should have killed him. Lord knows the other man was trying.

Stark has no one but himself to blame for how badly he has botched this dying business. But when is that not the case?

He killed himself so that he could be with the people only he could see, people he felt closer to than anyone with a pulse. The hunger had taken him by surprise; driving him to devour the very people (specters?) he once called his friends. And just when it looked like he had eaten his fill and the hunger began to flake away at the edges, he was too far gone to make up for lost time. His new friends, his masked friends, wasted away in his presence, poisonous in its density.

So he tried to end it all for a second time. And what had that earned him? A new body, just like his old body. Newfound power, just like the power that ended so many of his would-be friends.

And that's precisely the problem, he muses in the here and now. No matter what he tries, the lunatic laws of the afterlife conspire to sustain him.

When he tore away the mask, hoping it would be his own undoing, Coyote Stark had made a choice. He hadn't even been truly aware of it, but the choice had come and gone all the same. In the becoming an Arrancar, he stood at a forked road: Something of his old Hollow self, the power to heal from almost any wound, or an even greater power at the cost of his Hollow hardiness.

Most Hollows chose the second option, cutting away even more of their Hollow nature so that the newly minted Soul Reaper side of their souls might rush to fill the gap.

Stark chose the first.

And why not? Power was pain. It made you a target for dumb, young things looking to prove a name. Strength sucked the life out of wonderful souls. Spiritual pressure was a wall higher and steeper than anything else in the world.

So Stark had chosen life.

Lying in a pool of his own blood, looking up at the scene of a civil war playing out in an elaborate carbon copy of a city, Stark thinks he made the wrong choice. (Really, that's all it has been: A Soul Society civil war fought with pawn-Hollows on one side.)

What's the point in staying alive when all of your comrades are dead?

Too many of them perished in Las Noches. Even more came here, a place where you were only ever Sosuke Aizen's enemy or a convenient piece of cannon fodder. Halibel had it worst of all: She didn't even get to die fighting.

Stark reels at his own thought. He has spent too much time around Grimmjaw and Nnoitra. What does it matter if you die fighting or die of betrayal? You're gone, and the people close to you are that much lonelier.

Not that Aizen is one of those lonely people. Stark almost envies the way he can send the Arrancar to their destruction, shrug off Tousen's death, and cut down the people who respected and admired him.

He had tried not to care, to turn a blind eye and a shrugged shoulder toward all of those deaths. If you're weak, you die, he had muttered. But at least the weak died together. What of the Espada, rotting, bleeding, eviscerated? What kind of existential terror had flown through Barragan's mind to be eaten away by his own power, through Halibel's mind when her master cut her down, Ulquiorra and Yammy's minds when they were left alone to defend a useless castle from a phalanx of Captains?

Worst of all, what of Lilynette? He doesn't hear her voice anymore, can't feel the weight of the evaporated guns in his hands, will never resonate with the little nub of his soul that mouthed off and didn't tolerate his nonsense.

Stark had found friends inside himself, regurgitating his victims in strange configurations.

Most of them are gone, exploding in a kamikaze craze to wound the masked men, or extinguished by the sudden, shocking trauma of the Captain very nearly shearing him in half.

Everyone is dying for him all over again. Each soul staggers up to the front of the line to be converted or transformed or _what-the-fuck-ever_ it is that his body does in order fuel its own restoration. His breaths come a little easier, but the burden on his shoulders wears at him more than ever.

He will survive again, as he always does.

He isn't sure what to make of that. The Reapers and masked newcomers are making a spirited effort of finding the chink in Aizen's armor, but he has given them nothing in the way of handholds. Half of them are down and just when in looks like the last few fighters have found some way to outfight him, Aizen turns it all around yet again. Even that Captain, the one that came so tragically close to killing him, falls before he can unleash his _bankai_. Stark has to hand it to Aizen.

The man is nothing short of a magician.

Stark's mind wanders again because there's no way in hell his battered body will be moving any time soon. What will become of him? If the Soul Society prevails, will they execute him (too good to be true) or will he be carted off to their labs, to be poked and prodded? Yes, that seems likely. He'll never be allowed to die.

Even more distressing, what if Aizen's dreams come to fruition? Will the master of Las Noches kill him for his failures or, even worse, let him linger in a world where Aizen is king, where all of Stark's voices have gone silent again? The thought of living like that, shaped like a human, hungry like a Hollow, lonelier than both, is almost too much to bear.

And yet, Stark doesn't want to die. He does. But he doesn't.

It's all very confusing.

He's spent enough time around the Octava to know that death may be the worst fate of all for an Arrancar. Souls are typically recycled. But what of an Arrancar? The evidence is shaky, but the madman of Las Noches put forth a rather unnerving theory. Stark will never forget it.

Zaera-Polo had turned to him once, pink hair slashing across his face, smiling like a heroin-addicted whore.

"But an Arrancar that was once a Menos Grande, a conglomeration of souls…would it simply not _unravel_?"

But Zaera-Polo is dead. He's testing his own theory at the tip of a Captain's sword, and Stark is left to ponder.

The Captain-Commander plays his trump card, and Stark welcomes the flames, but Aizen douses even these. (So that's what was wrong with Wonderweiss.)

Stark almost laughs. The universe just loves to see him linger.


End file.
